They have overcome the outer world and the social world
entirely, they unfold our inner life, our mental play, with its feelings
and emotions, its memories and fancies, in a material which seems exempt
from the laws of the world of substance and material, tones which are
fluttering and fleeting like our own mental states. Of course, a
photoplay is not a piece of music. Its material is not sound but light.
But the photoplay is not music in the same sense in which it is not
drama and not pictures. It shares something with all of them. It stands
somewhere among and apart from them and just for this reason it is an
art of a particular type which must be understood through its own
conditions and for which its own esthetic rules must be traced instead
of drawing them simply from the rules of the theater.
CHAPTER IX
THE MEANS OF THE PHOTOPLAY
We have now reached the point at which we can knot together all our
threads, the psychological and the esthetic ones. If we do so, we come
to the true thesis of this whole book. Our esthetic discussion showed us
that it is the aim of art to isolate a significant part of our
experience in such a way that it is separate from our practical life and
is in complete agreement within itself. Our esthetic satisfaction
results from this inner agreement and harmony, but in order that we may
feel such agreement of the parts we must enter with our own impulses
into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and color
and form, every word and tone and note.
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